7 Ways All B2B Marketers Should Be Using Social Media (But Probably Aren’t)

I know what you’re thinking – the seven ways marketers should be using social will be all about Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Digg or Reddit, and YouTube, right? NO! These channels are just the places where we network with others online, not the best ways to do it. By participating in these channels doesn’t necessarily mean you are taking the right steps towards truly leveraging social media to your benefit. B2B companies must work a little differently to drive their own success in social media, and it goes beyond tweeting or posting. The business marketer needs to build a deeper relationship with their prospect or buyer. Use this list to see if you are really a B2B social media pro, or if there are places where you need to invest more time and effort.

Social Sharing – Social sharing links should be added to landing pages and emails to increase the chance of influencers, customers, and friends sharing your content with their audience.

Social Media as a Lead Source – When tweeting, contributing in forums, or posting in Linkedin, marketers should append their links to capture social media as a Lead Source. This will allow you to capture the ROI on your social media programs.

Social Media Referrers – In Google Analytics (or other web analytics services) you can see how many people visited your website, blog or landing pages from social media sites. What you can’t see is how these visitors break down by demographics in your database. You need to make sure when looking at social media stats that you go a step further and view them through the web reporting in your marketing automation system. Why would this be useful? Imagine, being able to say that 30% of the traffic your website receives from Twitter is from customers, but that the other 70% is from new visitors who are just learning about your product.

Triggering campaigns from social media interactions – If you are bringing social media conversations into your marketing automation system (either through companies like Radian6 or free services like Salesforce for Twitter), you can trigger campaigns off of their data. An example would be a triggered email inviting someone to comment on a Facebook conversation if they mention your company name in Twitter.

Social Media Lead Scoring – Similar to triggering campaigns from social media interactions, you can also change lead scores based on social media interactions. This might include decreasing lead scores if a comment in social media about your product has negative sentiment, or increasing lead score if they mention one of the products that you sell.

Social Validation – When marketers promote a white paper, event, webinar (or any other program), social validation widgets can be used to share what other people are saying. This is important when driving conversions and attendance, as viewers will know that what you have committed on your landing page is what is going to happen. It will also show how much buzz surrounds your campaign.

Integrated Programs – Marketers need to remember that social media is one of the channels that helps drive program success, and as such, must be integrated with all the other campaign components to drive the best results. I love this example (see picture below) where Paul Dunay uses Facebook as a way to share a chapter of his book, bringing his offline goals of book sales together with his online presence on Facebook.

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